


Midnight Blues

by Jackie Thomas (Jackie_Thomas)



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Episode: s02e04 The Great and the Good, Gen or Pre-Slash, M/M, Whiskey and painkillers don't mix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-27
Updated: 2014-04-27
Packaged: 2018-01-20 23:45:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1530176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jackie_Thomas/pseuds/Jackie%20Thomas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Have you been mindreading again, sergeant?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Midnight Blues

“Sir.”

Sergeant Hathaway is looming over me with my jacket in his hands. He is holding it up like a maître-d ready to be of service but he has an expression that has no intention of taking no for an answer.

“I’ll come back and carry on with this tomorrow, I swear, and for as long as you want me to but it’s nearly midnight and I’m really fed up and you look like you’re going to pass out.”

I could just send him home. If I pulled enough rank even he’d do as he was told eventually.

But my back is killing me and the drifting, dancing words on the page I am trying to read are long past making sense. 

I swallow a couple more of the useless back pills and, for the fiftieth time, ask, “But why would he send me that article if there was nothing here?” 

The jacket gives an insistent shake. “Because he was a nasty, little control freak of a crook.”

I cast my eye over the scattered piles of paper and the filing boxes beyond. He’s right, we’re finished here. I let him put me in my jacket and I wait by the car while he locks up.

Home, James. As if I could have such a thing without my Val.

Hathaway shoots a glance in my direction as he drives and I wonder which of my thoughts I have accidentally expressed out loud.

When we get to my house, he goes round to the passenger side to open the door, offers me his arm and I don’t have the strength to refuse it.

“Goodnight, sir.”

I realise he is planning on going straight home and I think about asking him in. I have a selfish need to have him across the kitchen table from me with a bottle of something between us. 

“Would you like me to come in?” He asks when I don’t reply.

I dismiss the idea; it is late and it wouldn’t be fair, “No, bonny lad, get yourself home.”

He looks startled at the endearment which I normally reserve for family but nods another goodnight and gets back into the car. He waits for me to go inside before driving away. 

I decide to open the bottle anyway. I haven’t felt this bad in a long time and I have forgotten how bad it can get. I don’t even think it is about missing my wife anymore; it is more about my own helplessness in the face of the wicked fate that took her. Drinking seems now, as it did in the early days, a solution of sorts; a temporary respite from the relentlessness of my thoughts. So I do.

“I’m glad to see you’re taking care of yourself,” says a small voice at the back of my mind, heavy with irony. I don’t listen.

~~

The next thing I know I’m waking up in a bay in A&E. I am lying on a trolley attached to a drip feeling like I’ve vomited up my internal organs. I strongly suspect I’ve done something stupid.

I hear a familiar voice speaking on the phone. Sergeant Hathaway is outside the bay lying to the Chief Superintendent on my behalf. 

“Yes ma’am, it’s his back again. He asked me to call in sick for him; he wanted to get some sleep.” He is maintaining the level of calm I normally associate with extreme anxiety. “Would it be all right if I took a day’s leave too? We didn’t finish at the Cooper house till late. Thank you, ma’am.”

He finishes the call, mutters ‘God-oh-God’ and comes into the bay. He is unshaven, has his glasses on and seems to have dressed in the first items of clothing that came to hand upon stumbling out of bed. 

“You’re awake,” he beams.

“What on earth happened?” I try to ask but my voice has vanished.

“Whiskey and painkillers, sir. You’re always so rock ‘n roll.”

I attempt to speak again but he puts his hand on mine to stop me. “You shouldn’t have been drinking so much with all those pills but you’re fine now. It wasn’t a massive overdose and I’ve explained it was accidental.” He looks for my reaction to this; he looks a question. “They said you can go home when you’re ready.” 

“Get me out of here, Hathaway,” I croak.

I have to see a doctor and be detached from the drip by a nurse. I have a lecture from both of them and then I am released. 

Hathaway summons a taxi and I close my eyes while he speaks to the driver and we get on our way. When I realise we are stopping I open my eyes and see where we are.

“Your flat?”

“I need to sort your place out a bit, if you’re all right to stay here.”

I wonder what needs to be sorted out at my flat while I’m not in it and decide not to dwell on the question.

“You don’t have to do that,” I suggest as he ushers me inside.

“It’s no problem, sir. Do you want breakfast or anything? Or do you just want to crash out? You look absolutely shattered.”

It seems a complicated series of questions and my inability to answer them is answer enough. I am steered into the flat’s one bedroom and when he goes to the kitchen to get me a glass of water I find I have to lie down.

Hathaway returns and is far from satisfied with the arrangement. With gentle efficiency and a flock of ‘sirs’ he removes my shoes and shirt and prods me until I take off my trousers. Only when he has me under the duvet in some kind of gigantic tracksuit does he leave me be. I am asleep almost immediately.

~~

When I wake it is dark again, I reach for the bedside lamp and remember it is Hathaway’s lamp and this is his room. There is a chair beside the bed and on it is a neat pile of clothes and toiletries from my flat. In the bathroom next door, I wash my face and brush my teeth and, so as not to further distress my sergeant, comb my hair.

Once dressed, I go in search of him. I find him on his living room couch hunched over his guitar, picking out chords. He has assembled his clothes and self in a more familiar, though casual, manner which I find reassuring. He looks up and smiles.

“How are you feeling?”

After a cough or two a version of my voice is back. “As well as can be expected.”

I sink into an armchair; the exertions of the last few minutes have exhausted me.

He puts the guitar aside. “Tea?”

When we each have a mug he sits back down. “There’s dinner later, if you’re up to it. Just soup, nothing challenging.”

“Thank you, James.”

He picks up his guitar again, coaxing a bluesy and distantly familiar tune from the notes he has been tinkering with. 

I soon realise he is not planning on asking me about what happened. I am grateful but he is owed whatever explanation I can give and I have some questions of my own.

“I don’t remember much,” I say. “Did someone find me last night? Did I phone you?”

I thought this would be an easy one to start with but it has evidently troubled him.

“No, sir, you didn’t phone.” 

“Then how –“

“I couldn’t sleep,” he says. “I was feeling bad for leaving you.”

I wonder what this has to do with my question. “I sent you home, if I recall.”

“I know, but I still shouldn’t have.” Some of the stress of his night flares in his eyes. “Eventually I realised I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I knew you were all right so I tried to phone you. No answer and no answer. So I went over to yours. You wouldn’t answer the door either so I broke the lock. But don’t worry, the locksmith came this afternoon.”

“Forget about the lock. You saved my life.” I shake my head, “And apparently, with the power of your mind.”

“It is a bit weird, isn’t it? Almost makes me want to start believing again.”

He glances at me before focusing on some complicated sequence in the tune he is working through.

He spares me the details of what he found when he broke into my flat, of what he had to do to keep me alive while he waited for the ambulance. He ought to be demanding to know what I thought I was playing at, but he seems determined not to burden me with questions.

I am ashamed in the face of this kindness, ashamed of having lost his respect and, most of all, ashamed of what I put him through. He is again skimming the surface of my thoughts.

“But we all are men,” he says softly. “In our own natures frail.”

Sometimes I catch a glimpse of the priest he might have become; how he can, by his simple presence, bring comfort.

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” I say, answering the question he won’t ask.

He leaves off his guitar and reaches for his tea but doesn’t reply.

“I completely understand if you don’t want to work with me anymore.” He starts to protest but I stop him. This has to be said. “I wouldn’t blame you for asking for a transfer if you felt I might not be safe to work with. But I want you to know I didn’t try to commit suicide last night.”

“I don’t want to work with anyone else,” he says flatly. “And you kept me after everything with Will.”

“All right. I appreciate it. After Val died I used to drink like that a lot. I wouldn’t recommend it but it was a way of shutting my brain down to get through the night. I hadn’t forgotten about the pills but I thought they’d just get me drunk quicker.”

Hathaway doesn’t speak until he has gone through a nearly visible process of ordering his thoughts.

“Yesterday, the way you were, some of the things you said. It was almost as though your rational mind wasn’t in control anymore. I should have seen it. I did see it but I didn’t act and I’ll never forgive myself.”

“Jim, come on, now.” The man could feel guilty for England. 

“I can’t imagine what it would be to lose someone I cared so much for. Or, at least, until last night I couldn’t imagine it.” He goes on before I have understood what he has told me. “But isn’t it possible you were unconsciously trying to bring an end to things?”

“It’s an interesting idea, but definitely not.”

“I’m speaking out of turn.”

“You’ve earned the right to speak,” I assure him. “But here’s how I know my unconscious mind wanted to stay alive as much as my conscious one.”

“Sir?”

“It called you. When I didn’t know what I was doing, it called the one person it knew would be listening.”

He holds my gaze for the first time today, his expression thoughtful.

When he goes back to his guitar his playing becomes more fluid as he gets into his stride and I finally realise what I am listening to. It is a favourite of mine from my younger days. I still can’t locate the name of the song. The band though.

“Midnight Addiction?” I ask.

“That’s right.”

“Have you been mindreading again, sergeant?”

“I found the records in your flat when I was waiting for the locksmith. Not bad actually, for bloated seventies dinosaurs.”

“You watch your tongue.”

He gives me a quick, smart grin but carries on playing. There is a different, simpler beauty to the piece when everything has been stripped away except for Hathaway’s clever fingers flying across the strings of an acoustic guitar.

The name of the track comes to me, “Is it Midnight Blues?”

“Yes, sir. Unplugged. Sing along if you like. The devils waiting in the shadows and I can’t get me no sleep.”

“I’m choosing to ignore your tone. Did I ever tell you I met Val at a Midnights show?”

His hand stills. “Which makes me an idiot.”

“Don’t be daft, it’s good to hold on to some memories. On you go.”

When he is sure I mean it, he begins again; weaving the past into the present and, in his own peculiar, steadfast way, chipping away at the part of me that set hard the day my wife died.

End

April 2014


End file.
